


elegy

by zipegs



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Grief/Mourning, Horror Elements, M/M, Not A Fix-It, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-07
Updated: 2019-08-07
Packaged: 2020-08-12 03:56:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20151097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zipegs/pseuds/zipegs
Summary: Sometimes, in the thickest hours of the night, Francis can hear their voices on the wind.





	elegy

Sometimes, in the thickest hours of the night, Francis can hear their voices on the wind.

They curl around the sealskin tents like tendrils of smoke, worming their way in through the gaps and underneath, piercing what little peace he has managed to carve out for himself and turning it sour.

He catches their cries, their lamentations and their warnings, and pictures them out there, alone. 

Forsaken.

_(He believes in no resurrection, no life beyond this one, but damn if it wouldn’t be fitting for them to rise again in this barren wasteland, to bleed and freeze and starve _in aeternum_, beyond all hope or promise of salvation.)_

Coiled underneath the frosty redolence of the Arctic, there comes the scent of spoiled rations and leaded tin. It coats the back of Francis’s throat like a film and lays slimy in his nasal passages. _(Goldner’s Patent Veal Soup (Gravy) The canister to be put into a saucepan with warm water and boiled about fifteen minutes, then opened and served up— _He can recite them all from memory, word by word, line by line, as a schoolboy might Ovid or Virgil.)If he closes his eyes, he can picture its stomach-churning appearance, lumpy and grey and squelching wetly as it drops in thick clods from spoon to plate. He can pretend he is back there, in that terrible expanse of nothingness where each day he and his dwindling company of men dragged their sledges closer and closer to death, and home was still a burgeoning hope inside them.

_God wants you to live_, _Francis._

He listens to the spectres in the air and wonders what, exactly, had been the point.

\---

The little sleep he manages to grasp brings no respite, for soon they come to him in dreams.

He closes his eyes and sees Jopson, dragging his broken body across the shingle. “Captain,” he wheezes, blood pooling in the cracks of his lips and staining his teeth poppy-red. “Captain Crozier.” Francis tries to go to him but finds he cannot; his feet are fastened to the ground as though soldered there. 

Jopson slaps a palm out in front of himself, and the rocks rattle like bones as he pulls his torso over them. An eternity passes thus, with the only sounds the feral howling of the wind and the slow, unsteady metronome of Jopson’s body jerking itself nearer and nearer. Unease begins to grow in Francis, balling itself tightly beneath his breast, and his pity caves in on itself with each uncoordinated, near-inhuman movement. Fear alights inside him, and as Jopson closes the distance between them, he is seized suddenly by the urge to flee.

Jopson’s hand closes slowly over the toe of his boot, and the leather squeals low and terrified under its grip. His fingernails are crusted with blood, deep rust-brown stains that peel and flake, sprinkling his skin and the soiled sleeves of his shirt like ashes. Francis watches on with mounting horror as Jopson levers himself higher and higher, scaling his legs like a spider, and fists a hand in the weathered canvas of his coat.

His urgency is tangible; he clings to Francis with impossible strength, eyes wide and glassy. With great effort, he opens his mouth, baring purpled gums that nearly swallow his teeth, and draws himself higher still. “I’ve got you, Captain,” he vows, and blood-flecked spittle peppers Francis’s waist like sea spray. His hand is a vice on Francis’s stomach. He cannot look away. “You can count on that, sir.”

\---

One morning, long past the time when scurvy and starvation had tightened their fists around his throat, and the stump of his hand had closed over with new-born flesh, Alorneq—for thus has he come to know the man who granted him mercy, who permitted him to live his penance here, in the place which has devoured his ships and his crew—stops him on his way through the camp.

“Aglooka,” he calls, and Francis stills. “You have been sick many nights.”

_(He lies on his cot and tries not to listen to the scrape of the sledges, the shift and slide of faltering feet over unsteady rock. When he closes his eyes, it’s canvas he sees, and he knows that when he wakes he’ll be back there, watching man after man collapse before him, powerless to do anything save watch them all die.)_

“Not sick,” he says, once silence has stretched between them. “Sleep... does not come.”

It is now Alorneq’s turn to pause. He studies Francis, dark eyes hammering deep, like long nails in the hull of a ship, and Francis feels the thin Arctic air swell with tension. In the space between them, he sees the ghosts of his men, looking on with bloodshot eyes and sallow, pitted cheeks.

“Your men,” Alorneq says, and Francis’s heart turns over in his chest. “The _anirniit_. You see them?”

He frowns. “_An-Anirniit_,” he tries, tasting the word in his mouth. It is one he doesn’t know.

Alorneq nods once, a small, sharp motion. He gestures to his chest, then opens his palms and gestures more broadly. “_Anirniit. _They come to you?”

A meaning is beginning to take shape before him, like a figure emerging from the fog. With it comes an icy trepidation; Francis is not certain he wants to answer. He thinks of Jopson, of the bitter echo of Goodsir’s voice, of Little’s face, pierced through with gold. He holds Alorneq’s gaze and says nothing.

Alorneq’s expression tightens. They watch each other carefully, and around them, the camp begins to stir. When it becomes clear that Alorneq has nothing more to say—or at least, that there is nothing more to which he currently intends to give voice—Francis drags his mind off of his crew and walks away.

He feels Alorneq’s eyes follow him long after he is out of sight.

\---

It isn’t long afterwards that another voice threads its way through his mind, slight and insidious and nearly indiscernible at first. Francis is on his way back from hunting seal, and thinks it the wind pushing through the fur of his hood, or perhaps the low murmuring of distant Netsilik.

But Cornelius Hickey had always been an unmistakable man, and he remains so, even in death. Gooseflesh forms on the back of Francis’s neck, and a chill of a wholly unnatural sort curls along his spine.

“Have you ever wondered, Mr. Crozier,” the voice asks, thin and softened, as though borne down from a great distance, “what happens to a soul when the thing that ate it dies?”

\---

They come to him in shifts, as though adhering to a preternatural schedule of watches even when they have left their bodies and boats behind. It is a small mercy, to not face them all at once, but it is mercy nonetheless.

_(He imagines it: 130 men with arms outstretched, surrounding him, overwhelming him, crushing him and dragging him under, like _Erebus _and _Terror _in the pack.)_

“You are the worst kind of Captain, Francis,” Sir John tells him one night, distaste marring the waxen lines of his face. “You will never be fit for command.”

He listens to Bridgens weeping for Peglar, watches Goodsir slice into the soft flesh of his own wrist with trembling hands and a jagged shard of glass. Stanley, flesh blackened and crumbling away from his ruined face, groans that Francis should have let them all burn, and Silna looks on in silence, the crimson blood painted from her jaw down to her chest shifting and curling with shadows like demons in a scrying glass. Fairholme Francis sees as well, cursed to fall among the first but spared the hysteria and slow, agonizing decay which descended upon the rest of them. He thanks Francis for this, face purpled and mustache congealed with ice, only wishing he might find his body again.

Francis endures them as best he can _(For_ _is this not his burden to shoulder? A Captain, they say, must go down with his ship. And if there is no ship which hitherto remains, do his men not suit that purpose?)_ and takes his rest where he can find it. They begin to repeat themselves, the same sailor moaning twice, thrice, until Francis feels he may split apart from the sheer volume of the grief his men pour into him, like a taxidermied beast filled with too much stuffing.

\---

There is one ghost whom Francis has not yet suffered.

He wonders when he will come, and what he will say when he does.

\---

“Well, aren’t you just a miserable old cunt?”

Francis exhales and settles back onto his haunches. “Thomas.”

“Aye.” There is silence for a moment, in which Francis realizes he feels not his accustomed dread. Instead, Thomas’s voice, crude as it is, soothes the stinging of his mind, and though he sees no apparition, he has the sense of nearness. “It’s good to see you alive,” Thomas continues. “Although if memory serves, there was more of you, last I saw.”

Francis finds his mouth quirking upward on one side; a shadow of wry amusement curls low and warm in his abdomen. He lifts the stump of his hand and plays at examining it. “Unfortunately,” he says drily, “no one has been so kind as to carve me a replacement.”

“Ah, they’re more trouble than they’re worth.”

Francis makes a noise of acknowledgement, and after a moment, returns his arm to his side. They lapse into silence once more; again, it unfurls nearly tranquil throughout the tent, and he notes with some surprise that their interaction thus far is remarkably at odds with his other visitations. Francis wonders if it is so because it is Thomas, or if this is some conceit of his mind, which has been pushed so far past its limits that it cannot bear any further pain.

“You should go back,” Thomas says, after an indeterminate time has stretched past. “Leave all of this behind.” But there is no conviction in his tone, and Francis suspects that Thomas knows as well as he: there is no future for him there.

“It would only follow me,” Francis says, leaning his head back against the platform on which he sleeps. He closes his eyes, but he can still see the insinuation of firelight dancing across the backs of his lids. “You know that as well as I. Once the ice gets inside of you, it doesn’t leave. I’ll carry this load with me ‘till the day I die.”

\---

One night, when the mildness of summer has begun to temper the air, Francis Crozier closes his eyes, and, _finally_, he sees him. Most of him, at least.

He is laid out prone as Goodsir was, pale and naked, with muscle and sinew stripped in neat chunks from the back of his arm, his thigh. The exposed flesh beneath is wet and red, glistening with blood. Francis makes a noise low in his throat and staggers toward the butcher’s table. “_James_,” he moans, and after a moment, Fitzjames opens his eyes.

“I asked you to use my body, Francis,” he says, blinking slowly as though reacclimating himself to the sensation. His words are thick with hurt, and there is betrayal in the furrow of his brow. “To feed the men.”

Francis feels sick. “I know. I couldn’t.”

“It might have saved them.”

“We were well past saving,” he says, although there is a sliver of doubt in him still, lodged sharp and painful just beneath the surface of his skin. (_Has he not turned every single moment of the past four years over in his hands? No solution has yet emerged, no answer writ in the confines of his memory; there has been no moment of revelation, no transparency in hindsight. All roads lead to ruin.)_ He reminds himself how the dying, once started, could not be stopped—how one death swelled to two, to three and four, to five. By the end, there had been no point in erecting a separate tent for the sick—not when the scurvy had taken root in all of them. When you went to bed, you laid down in your cot beside your mates and hoped to God you weren’t the one who didn’t wake again.

His thoughts shatter as James inhales—a great, sucking breath that presses his ribs up against the snow-white skin of his back. His wounds begin to bleed, red welling up in the places where his body should be but isn’t and spilling over. It streams in rivers down his colourless skin and pools on the table, finds the gaps in the wood and spatters down to the shingle, the only source of color in this grey-washed world.

“You left me there,” James says, his mouth folding clumsily around the words. (_It had been like this at the end, Francis remembers, with James’s body too weak even to coax his tongue into motion, too drained to waste energy wrapping his lips around idle speech. His eloquence had withered, his body sucked dry of poetry. It had been impossible to bear.) _“For Hickey and his men to harvest.”

“I’m so sorry,” Francis says, voice breaking over the apology like waves on the shoals. “I truly am. If I had known—” Guilt, like a bayonet, lodges itself in his chest, and he closes his eyes against the recollection of James’s boots wrapped proud and tall around Cornelius Hickey’s feet, the silver-threaded “JF” on each side glimmering like a beacon in the frigid Arctic sunlight.

_Make him invisible. I don’t want him found and pawed._

It is difficult to speak around the lump in his throat. He reaches down with trembling hand and smoothes James’s hair back from his bloodshot eyes, tries to tuck it tenderly behind his ear. He thinks of all the ways in which he could have touched James—in which he _should_ have touched James—and didn’t_. _They cluster in the back of his throat, and Francis is forced to swallow around them.“I ought to’ve buried you.”

When James speaks, his voice quavers, low and ashamed.“I wanted to live,” he says, and his lip trembles in the wake of his admission. Fat pink tears gather between his lashes and, too heavy to cling there for more than a moment, add their dripping to the pools of blood on the ground. 

“I know.” The words are ground out of Francis like flour from a millstone. He lowers himself gracelessly onto his knees and brushes his fingertips over James’s temple, his jaw. James presses weakly into the touch, letting his eyes flutter closed, and Francis despises that it is only here, only now, that they have mustered the courage to comport themselves thus, with candor unfettered by fear or modesty or the vestiges of decorum. He cups the side of James’s face in his hand and strokes a thumb over his waxen cheekbone, trying desperately not to regard the parts of him which have been sliced away. “But you were so strong, James. You’ve done so well. You deserve to be at rest.”

The moment suspends between them, but with each breath, it morphs slowly from fragile to brittle, and a sourness blooms beneath it which Francis can nearly taste. The blood on the ground is beginning to seep through his trousers, sticky and cold, and James’s flesh feels stiff and unyielding beneath his hand. Abruptly, preceded by no sign or warning, his eyes shoot open. “Francis, help me,” he begs, and Francis’s fingers spasm on his cheek. _(He has not slept in days, has barely moved from James’s side. He counts each breath that struggles its way into James’s lungs for fear it will be his last, has studied his face so thoroughly that he can map each place his flesh splits to make way for budding bulbs of blood.)_

He does not know what to do.

_Muscles are in spasm, sir. They’ve gone rigid._

Overwhelmed, he closes his eyes and presses his forehead hard against the weathered edge of the table. “Help me. Help me out of it, Francis.” James’s breath is hot in his hair. It smells of pennies, and decay.

_Are you certain?_

He keeps his eyes screwed tight, and listens to the rattle of James’s breath in and out of his lungs, the steady patter of his blood on the ground. Dread is clinging to his skin like spiderwebs, and though he does not want to do this, he knows he must see it through.

“Help me out of it, Francis,” James says again, his voice wheezing forth from his chest, hitching and sticking in his swollen throat. “Help me out of it. Francis. Help me, Francis.”

Francis gathers his courage to himself and blows it out in one hard breath. He lifts his head and traces the outline of James’s face. “It’s all right,” he says, and he stands, letting his fingers trail softly over James’s cheek. “Close your eyes.” He does.

_I will suffer what is mine to bear, _Francis thinks, and he covers James’s mouth and nose with his hand.

\---

In the daylight, he will pull his parka tightly about himself and prepare his sledge for another day of fishing. His boots will carve footprints into the crusty remnants of winter snow, and the forgetful sun will smile serenely down over him, although it will grant him no warmth.

In the hours of silence that descend, he will stand at the edge of the river and think how heavy Silna’s talisman feels against his breast.

**Author's Note:**

> The biggest of thank-yous to [Askance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance) for helping me wrangle this little beast into shape!


End file.
